Journal articles: 'Aesthetic of music for the silent film'

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Ladd, Marco. "Synchronization as Musical Labor in Italian Silent Cinemas." Journal of the American Musicological Society 75, no. 2 (2022): 273–317. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jams.2022.75.2.273.

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Abstract This article examines a series of lawsuits that consumed Italy’s legal establishment between approximately 1924 and 1933. Resulting from a protracted labor dispute between instrumental musicians who worked in cinemas and the exhibitors who employed them, the lawsuits turned on a question of employment law: whether musicians ought to be considered full-time employees—entitled to various benefits and protections against unfair termination—or more precariously situated freelancers whom exhibitors could hire and fire at will. As a consequence of the vagaries of existing Italian labor law and new Fascist legislation governing labor relations, musicians were already at a disadvantage in this dispute. Unexpectedly, their situation was further undermined by the judiciary, as Italy’s highest court made their employee status conditional on the perceived aesthetic value of cinema and its associated music making. That is, musicians had to prove that their musical abilities were integral to the artistic outcome of any given film screening—a tall order in the context of silent cinematic exhibition, where musical accompaniment was materially distinct from the projected film. Precisely because the courts valorized the fusion of music and image, however, the Italian musicians’ lawsuits illuminate a fundamental parameter of cinematic aesthetics—synchronization—and reveal something significant about the nature of film music. Public recognition for effecting music-image synchronization in film conferred symbolic, but also literal, capital; thus I contend that synchronization ought to be understood as a form of musical labor, both in the silent era and beyond.

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ROUST, COLIN. "‘Say it with Georges Auric’: Film Music and the esprit nouveau." Twentieth-Century Music 6, no. 2 (September 2009): 133–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572210000149.

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AbstractAlthough he composed more than 120 film scores during his career, Georges Auric (1899–1983) did not compose his first until well after his thirtieth birthday. However, as a disciple of Guillaume Apollinaire's esprit nouveau he was interested in the genre much earlier. Between 1919 and 1928 he published three pieces of film music criticism that are couched in the rhetoric of Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau. In 1931 he composed his second film score, for René Clair's 1931 film A Nous, la Liberté! Although the music was composed after the esprit nouveau movement had effectively faded away, it is one of the clearest examples of that aesthetic. Because of the extraordinary collaborative relationship between Clair and Auric, the film also presents one of the most striking early solutions to the problem of how sound could be incorporated into the artistic rhetoric of silent cinema.

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Mikheeva, Julia V. "Sound in the films of Michael Haneke from the perspective of phenomenological aesthetics." Journal of Flm Arts and Film Studies 11, no. 3 (November 13, 2019): 116–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/vgik113116-127.

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The philosophical and aesthetic ideas of phenomenology have been present in cinema theory since the silent period. Methods of phenomenological theory can be found in the analysis of the visual aspects of films or the artistic style of their authors. The essay analyses signs of phenomenological thinking in the audiovisual aspects of films - a little studied but significant area of directorial aesthetics. Its theoretical and methodological foundation includes the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and elements of phenomenological aesthetics in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Roman Ingarden. Taking the work of a significant representative of auteur cinema, the Austrian director Michael Haneke, the author explores cinematic variations of the concept of phenomenological reduction, the method of perfectly clear apprehension of the essence and the layered semantic structure of the film. Conclusions are drawn about the presence of typological signs of phenomenological thinking in the work of other filmmakers, such as Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Visually, this presence is expressed in the tendency towards asceticism and documentarism in the choice of artistic devices; towards the disclosure of cinematic phenomena (facts); and aurally, in the tendency to minimize off-screen music and get rid of the expressiveness in the actor's speech, towards greater semantic significance of intra-frame music, individual sounds, pauses and non-sounds.

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Nye, Edward. "Jean-Gaspard Deburau: Romantic Pierrot." New Theatre Quarterly 30, no. 2 (May 2014): 107–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x14000232.

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Jean-Gaspard Deburau was the nineteenth-century mime artist who created a new model for subsequent performers to either imitate or reject, but hardly to ignore. Silent cinema benefited from the nineteenth-century vogue for the mime in general – and the Pierrot character that he did so much to popularize in particular. The most famous mime of the twentieth century, Marcel Marceau, derived his character ‘Bip’ in part from Deburau's Pierrot. And while two of the most influential French mime artists of the twentieth century, Jean-Louis Barrault and Étienne Decroux, sought a radical departure from his Pierrot tradition, they ironically found themselves in the now legendary French film Les Enfants du paradis acting the parts respectively of Deburau and Deburau's father. In this article Edward Nye explores the reasons for Deburau's success from two perspectives: first, by considering Deburau's reputation for clarity of expression, and the absence of critical or public debate over any obscurity; and second, the context of the Romantic movement which primed spectators to appreciate his style of performance. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Mime, Music, and Drama on the Eighteenth-Century Stage: the Ballet d'Action (CUP 2011), Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in À Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000).

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Leonard, Kendra Preston. "Using Resources for Silent Film Music." Fontes Artis Musicae 63, no. 4 (2016): 259–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fam.2016.0033.

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Yeung, Lorraine K. C. "An Aesthetic of Horror Film Music." Film and Philosophy 23 (2019): 159–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/filmphil2019239.

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Tieber, Claus, and Anna K. Windisch. "A highly creative endeavour: Interview with musicologist and silent film pianist Martin Marks." Soundtrack 12, no. 1 (November 1, 2020): 61–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ts_00012_7.

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Martin Marks holds an almost unique position to talk about silent film music: he is a scholarly musician and musical scholar. Besides his canonical book on the history of silent film music (1997), he has been playing piano accompaniments for silent films regularly for nearly four decades. In this interview we asked Martin about the challenges and complexities of choosing and creating music to accompany musical numbers in silent cinema. Martin relates how he detects musical numbers and he expounds his decision-making process on how to treat them. His explanations are interspersed with engaging examples from his practical work and based on both his scholarly knowledge and on his musical intelligence. He talks about the use of pre-existing music as well as about anachronisms in choosing music written many decades after a film was first released. In sum, this interview delivers detailed and informed insights into the difficulties and pleasures of accompanying musical numbers or other types of diegetic music in silent cinema.

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Gayle Magee. "Editor's Introduction: Special Issue on Silent Film Music." American Music 36, no. 1 (2018): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.36.1.0001.

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Hoshino, Masashi. "Humphrey Jennings's ‘Film Fables’: Democracy and Image in The Silent Village." Modernist Cultures 15, no. 2 (May 2020): 133–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/mod.2020.0286.

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This essay explores modernism's aesthetic and political implications through examining the works of Humphrey Jennings. The essay takes as a starting point the tension inherent to the democratic aesthetic of Mass Observation between the individual observers and the editors who write up. This tension can be effectively examined in terms of what Jacques Rancière calls ‘film fables’: the Aristotelian ‘fable’ of dramatic action and cinema's ‘fable’ of egalitarian treatment of ‘passive’ images. The essay argues that the paradox between the two ‘fables’ can be observed in Jennings's works, especially in his essays on Thomas Gray, his ‘report’ poems, and The Silent Village (1943), a dystopian propaganda film set in a Welsh village invaded by Nazis Germany. By looking at these works, the essay illustrates how the utopian longing for ‘pure art’ in modernism is related to the impossible idea of ‘democracy’.

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Provenzano, Catherine. "Towards an Aesthetic of Film Music: Musicology Meets the Film Soundtrack." Music Reference Services Quarterly 10, no. 3-4 (September 30, 2008): 79–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10588160802111220.

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Cieślak, Agnieszka. "Bronisław Mirski - Polish Music Director of the Silent Film Era1." Musicology Today 17, no. 1 (December 1, 2020): 72–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/muso-2020-0006.

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Abstract Bronisław Mirski (b. 1887 as Moszkowicz in Żyrardów near Warsaw, Poland – d. 1927 in El Paso, Texas) belongs to the substantial group of Polish émigré artists of Jewish origin. A violinist and conductor educated in Europe, he permanently settled in the United States at the end of 1914 under the name of Nek Mirskey and soon began working as a music director in movie theatres. He was in charge of the musical settings for elaborate artistic programmes composed of silent films as well as music and stage attractions. His first widely acclaimed shows were presented at the Metropolitan Theatre of Harry M. Crandall's chain in Washington, D.C. Based primarily on the American press of 1921–23, this article discusses Mirski's work methods and his involvement in improving the quality of live musical accompaniment for silent films. The work that he continued till the end of his life places him among the foremost musicians of the silent film era.

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Brown, Geoff. "‘Dead as the wooden battleship’: The Fate of Silent British Features in the Transition to Sound." Journal of British Cinema and Television 17, no. 2 (April 2020): 151–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2020.0517.

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Dead as the wooden battleship, dead as the magic lantern: such were the similes used in 1929 by some in the British film industry to describe the fate of silent cinema in the new talkie era. Other voices predicted a lingering half-life. Either way, most film companies faced a common problem: what to do in 1929 with their stock of silent films which were completed but unreleased. Foregrounding the activities of British International Pictures, Gainsborough Pictures and the distributors Equity British, this article explores the aesthetic, practical and technical problems in exhibiting and sonically titivating silent product as the industry adjusted to sound technology. Topics include the problems generated by the Cinematograph Films Act 1927; the damage caused by awkwardly dubbed voices; the perils of management divisions; the re-release of older silent films; audience and critical dissatisfaction; and the output of young film-makers such as John F. Argyle, who made his last silent feature, The Final Reckoning, in September 1931. British silent cinema's death, it turns out, was neither quick nor painless.

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Tieber, Claus, and Anna K. Windisch. "Musical moments and numbers in Austrian silent cinema." Soundtrack 12, no. 1 (November 1, 2020): 7–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ts_00009_1.

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Although the film musical as a genre came into its own with the sound film technologies of the late 1920s and early 1930s, several characteristic features did not originate solely with the sound film. The ‘musical number’ as the epitome of the genre, can already be found in different forms and shapes in silent films. This article looks at two Austrian silent films, Sonnige Träume (1921) and Seine Hoheit, der Eintänzer (1926), as case studies for how music is represented without a fixed sound source, highlighting the differences and similarities of musical numbers in silent and sound films. The chosen films are analysed in the contexts of their historical exhibition and accompaniment practices, Austria’s film industry as well as the country’s cultural-political situation after the end of the monarchy. These two examples demonstrate that several characteristics of the film musical are based on the creative endeavours made by filmmakers during the silent era, who struggled, failed and succeeded in ‘visualizing’ music and musical performances in the so-called ‘silent’ films. In reconstructing their problems and analysing their solutions, we are able to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of musical numbers during the silent era and on a more general level.

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Fuchs. "Hermann Kretzschmar's Forgotten Heirs: “Silent”-Film Music as Applied Hermeneutics." Music and the Moving Image 12, no. 3 (2019): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/musimoviimag.12.3.0003.

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Grover-Friedlander, Michal. "‘The phantom of the Opera’: the lost voice of opera in silent film." Cambridge Opera Journal 11, no. 2 (July 1999): 179–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586700005000.

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Film's attraction to opera began not with the technical possibility of synchronising the operatic voice with the image, but earlier, in the silent era. In the New York Times of 27 August 1910 Thomas Edison declared: ‘We'll be ready for the moving picture shows in a couple of months, but I'm not satisfied with that. I want to give grand opera.’ What did silent film seek in opera? Would a silent film of or about opera have any meaning? What are the possibilities for silent opera? How would a mute operatic voice appear in film?

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Rochester, Katherine. "Visual Music and Kinetic Ornaments." Feminist Media Histories 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2021): 115–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2021.7.1.115.

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This essay traces the theorization of interwar animation through period analogies with painting and dance, paying special attention to the valorization of concepts such as dematerialization and embodiment, which metaphors of visual music and physical kinesthesis were used to promote. Beginning in 1919, and exemplified by her feature-length film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), Lotte Reiniger directed numerous silhouette films animated in an ornate style that embraced decorative materiality. This aesthetic set her in uneasy relation to the avant-garde, whose strenuous attempts to distance abstraction from ornament took the form of absolute film, and were screened together at the Absolute film Matinee of 1925. However, their claims for aesthetic integrity were staked on territory these artists largely had in common. By adopting a feminist approach that examines networks of collaboration, publication, and artistic production in Weimar Berlin, this essay reveals Reiniger as an early proponent of haptic cinema in interwar Europe and one of animation's earliest and most perceptive theorists.

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Brooks, Erin M. "Silent Film Sound & Music Archive: A Digital Repository. https://www.sfsma.org." Journal of the Society for American Music 14, no. 4 (November 2020): 522–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196320000395.

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Cieślak-Krupa, Agnieszka. "A Kiss for Cinderella (1925) The Importance of Historical Accuracy in Reconstructing Scores to Silent Films Based on the Mirskey Collection." Musicology Today 19, no. 1 (December 1, 2022): 73–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/muso-2022-0005.

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Abstract Collections of silent film music constitute valuable sources for historical research on the musical practice in the silent film era. The musical prints preserved in the Mirskey Collection were previously used by the author to reconstruct a score for the movie A Kiss for Cinderella (1925, dir. Herbert Brenon). This article describes the historical context considered during the reconstruction and discusses the workflow applied by Nek Mirskey (Bronisław Mirski) as a musical director of movie theatres. A comparative analysis of sheet music from the Mirskey Collection accompanied by handwritten notes, original cue sheet compiled by James Bradford for the Paramount Pictures, and a digitised copy of the film, have led to conclusions that are applicable not only to Mirskey's methods of compiling scores, but also to the more general rules for the development of musical accompaniments to silent films in the 1920s.

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Wyke, Maria. "Mobilizing Pompeii for Italian Silent Cinema." Classical Receptions Journal 11, no. 4 (September 17, 2019): 453–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/crj/clz015.

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Abstract A documentary film about the eruption of Vesuvius in 1906 juxtaposes scenes of the damage and deaths it caused in neighbouring communities with shots of Pompeii — the ancient city of the long-since dead. The documentary suggests that Pompeii is a picturesque site where the privileged tourist experiences aesthetic detachment from the excavators’ labour or the locals’ suffering. Despite this critique, four Italian fiction films about the last days of Pompeii were made between 1908 and 1926. This article explores those films and argues that they mobilize Pompeii both for modern Italians and for cinema. They situate viewers immersively within the reconstructed city and substitute for a detached tourist gaze an impassioned, participatory one.

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Wierzbicki, James. "Silent Listening." Resonance 1, no. 1 (2020): 60–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/res.2020.1.1.60.

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This essay explores how one “listens to”—that is to say, how one takes in, makes sense of, and reacts to—“sounds” that are not really sounds at all but that are simply evocations of sounds served up by the authors of fiction. Although the essay’s conclusions apply to literary sounds in general, the examples on which the essay bases its observations and arguments are drawn—because their affective range is so very, very wide—from the vintage literature of so-called horror fiction. After a discussion of why some instances of scary literary sounds are more potent than others, emphasis is placed on sounds featured in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, writers celebrated for their “aurality” yet whose structural use of sonic imagery—in dynamic patterns in the case of Lovecraft, as markers of plot points in the case of Poe—has hitherto been neglected. Throughout the essay parallels are of course drawn between literary sounds and actual sounds encountered both in the real world and in the fictional worlds of film, television, and radio drama. Readers of the essay are invited to decide for themselves, but it is suggested here that “silent listening”—because it demands creative involvement on the part of its participants—results in a richer aesthetic experience.

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Wright, H. Stephen, and Martin Miller Marks. "Music in the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924." Notes 55, no. 1 (September 1998): 118. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/900371.

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Howlin, Claire, Staci Vicary, and Guido Orgs. "Audiovisual Aesthetics of Sound and Movement in Contemporary Dance." Empirical Studies of the Arts 38, no. 2 (December 12, 2018): 191–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0276237418818633.

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How do movement and sound combine to produce an audiovisual aesthetics of dance? We assessed how audiovisual congruency influences continuous aesthetic and psychophysiological responses to contemporary dance. Two groups of spectators watched a recorded dance performance that included the performer’s steps, breathing, and vocalizations but no music. Dance and sound were paired either as recorded or with the original soundtrack in reverse so that the performers’ sounds were no longer coupled to their movements. A third group watched the dance video in silence. Audiovisual incongruency was rated as more enjoyable than congruent or silent conditions. In line with mainstream conceptions of dance as movement-to-music, arbitrary relationships between sound and movement were preferred to causal relationships in which performers produce their own soundtrack. Performed synchrony Granger caused changes in electrodermal activity only in the incongruent condition consistent with “aesthetic capture.” Sound structures the perception of dance movement, increasing its aesthetic appeal.

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Knight, A. "Silent Screen, Live Sounds: A Symposium on Music and Silent Film, University of Chicago, 6 February 1993." Screen 34, no. 3 (September 1, 1993): 287–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/screen/34.3.287.

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ZECHNER, INGEBORG. "Multiple-Music Versions?" Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 15, no. 2 (December 1, 2021): 133–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2021.9.

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With the advent of sound film in the early 1930s the German film industry produced so-called multiple-language versions as a part of its internationalisation strategy. These versions were produced for the French, English, and Italian markets (often) with a new cast of actors. Despite the importance of music in these films, a systematic study on the role of music in these multiple-language versions is still lacking. This article offers a first case study on the topic by comparing the German, Italian, and French versions of the sound film-operetta Paprika (1932/1933). It will be illustrated that the music (rather than sound) as well as the use of the musical material in the versions of Paprika differed significantly. Musical adaptation was used as an important means to shape the film’s narrative and to create a distinct aesthetic for each of the film’s versions. Historically, there are evident parallels to the adaptation practice of opera and operetta over the past centuries.

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Kulezic-Wilson, Danijela. "Musical and film time." Muzikologija, no. 8 (2008): 253–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/muz0808253k.

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Comparative analysis of linear, non-linear and multiple temporal dimensions in music and film reveals that the understanding and utilisation of time in these two arts reflect not only the aesthetic inclinations of its creators and their subjective experiences of temporality but also their philosophical views and, sometimes, spiritual beliefs. Viewed in the context of contemporary theories about Time, particularly Shallis' interpretation of different temporalities as symbolic of various levels of reality and J. T. Fraser's concept of time as a hierarchical nest of different temporalities or Umwelts, the results of this comparison lead to the conclusion that the time in which music and film unfold belongs to a separate, artificial Umwelt of its own - art-temporality.

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Graff, Peter. "Re-Evaluating the Silent-Film Music Holdings at the Library of Congress." Notes 73, no. 1 (2016): 33–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/not.2016.0099.

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Tieber, Claus. "Music and Sound in Silent Film: From the Nickelodeon to The Artist." Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 39, no. 4 (July 22, 2019): 906–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2019.1643156.

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Tieber, Claus. "Walter Reisch: The musical writer." Journal of Screenwriting 10, no. 3 (September 1, 2019): 295–306. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/josc_00005_1.

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Academy Award-winning Austrian screenwriter Walter Reisch’s (1903‐83) career started in Austrian silent cinema and ended in Hollywood. Reisch wrote the screenplays for silent films, many of them based on musical topics (operetta films, biopics of musicians, etc.). He created the so-called Viennese film, a musical subgenre, set in an almost mythological Vienna. In my article I am analysing the characteristics of his writing in which music plays a crucial part. The article details the use of musical devices in his screenplays (his use of music, the influence of musical melodrama, instructions and use of songs and leitmotifs). The article closes with a reading of the final number in the last film he was able to make in Austria: Silhouetten (1936).

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Zhang, Yan, and Hyuntai Kim. "Explore the Function of Film and Teleplay Music Structure: Analysis of Film and Teleplay Music Language from the Perspective of Structure." Korean Society of Culture and Convergence 44, no. 7 (July 31, 2022): 665–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.33645/cnc.2022.7.44.7.665.

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Music is a part of sound elements in movies, and it is the earliest, also the most important part. the Film and Teleplay music in the overall structure and design of Film and Teleplay works, which cooperates with the movie theme, scene, language and plot, creates a considerable number of myths. This article chooses to conduct a functional analysis of Film and Teleplay music from a structural point of view. In addition to studying the overall structure of Film and Teleplay music, it is also necessary to decompose and explain its constituent elements. The combined study of the two can give the most comprehensive explanation of the functions of Film and Teleplay music, and can pry into the unique aesthetic value of music in Film and Teleplay works.

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Doboş, Cristian Ilie. "Kitsch aspects in film music." Artes. Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (April 1, 2022): 250–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/ajm-2022-0016.

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Abstract History has documented the human species’ struggles to understand beauty and communities’ efforts to grow through education. Figures of universal culture, such as Plato, Aristotle, G. W. F. von Leibniz, A. G. Baumgarten, I. Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, etc. tackled matters of aesthetics with great care. In the postmodernist period art, one of the four pillars of a peoples’ culture, together with language, history and religion, goes through a particular phase about which we cannot unequivocally say that is evolutionary. Under the onslaught of common people’s entertainment culture, contemporary art has a hard time maintaining its initial mission, that of elevating man’s soul and generating aesthetic projections of reality on a cognitive plane. The overwhelming significance that art and natural beauty carry in the intellectual life, beginning with the 18th century, is challenged by kitsch, this scourge, which came to prominence within society from the time when bourgeois civilization reached its peak, towards the end of the 19th century. Following a short presentation of various kitsch forms, associations and typologies in music, history, architecture, sculpture, decorative art and interior design, choreography, media, etc., we discuss kitsch aspects in film music, emphasising unjustified, incongruous and unempathetic associations between music and the rest of the filmic units. At the same time, we also present possible solutions for avoiding association errors. The examples are structured in the following subchapters: stylistic incongruities between filmic units vs. characteristics of the epoch augmented by music; using mainly dissonant or atonal sonorities in movies; exploring different cultures: ethnic music between deformation and authenticity; national and international in Romanian movies; representative songs - the more or less commercial exogenous motivation of film music; regarding the quantity of musical events in movies.

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Mikheeva, Yuliya V. "Music as a Part of the Theatrical Game of the Movie." Journal of Flm Arts and Film Studies 9, no. 1 (March 15, 2017): 60–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/vgik9160-73.

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In many contemporary films the theatricalization of separate elements or the film as a whole is used as a means to renovate and individualize the film language. In some cases this process attains an extraordinary freedom (both technical and aesthetic) while using audiovisual means not yet adequately analyzed theoretically but influencing the artistic language and style of the film. The article deals with the role of music and more widely with the audiovisual film solutions in the process.

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SIMONSON, MARY. "Visualizing Music in the Silent Era: The Collaborative Experiments of Visual Symphony Productions." Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 1 (January 25, 2018): 2–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752196317000505.

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AbstractIn July 1922, the New York Times reported that the “encouraging little film” Danse Macabre was screening at the Rialto Theater in New York City. Directed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy, it starred dancers Adolph Bolm and Ruth Page in a visual interpretation of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre that synchronized perfectly with live performances of the composition. While film scholars have occasionally cited Danse Macabre and Murphy's other shorts from this period as examples of early avant-garde filmmaking in the United States, discussions of the films are mired in misunderstanding. In this article, I use advertisements, reviews, and other archival materials to trace the production, exhibition, and reception of Murphy's Visual Symphony project. These films, I argue, were not Murphy's alone: rather, they were a collaborative endeavor guided as heavily by musician and film exhibitor Hugo Riesenfeld as by Murphy himself. Recast in this way, the Visual Symphony project highlights evolving approaches to sound–image synchronization in the 1920s, the centrality of theater conductors and musicians to filmmaking in this period, and the various ways in which filmmakers, performers, and exhibitors conceptualized the relationship between music and film, and the live and the mediated, in the final decade of the silent era.

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Mecija, Casey. "“The desert’s no home for a rose”: Filipinx childhood and music as aesthetic experience." Global Studies of Childhood 11, no. 2 (June 2021): 164–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/20436106211022752.

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This article examines Diane Paragas’ film Yellow Rose (2019) for its capacity to offer important insights into the reparative utility of music for a child separated from a parent due to deportation. While the film depicts the brutality of contemporary U.S. migration policies, Yellow Rose is also a story about the role of aesthetic expression in childhood’s diasporic imaginaries. The film teaches us about the agentic potential of music as a mode of dealing with the trauma of forced separation. In particular, the genre of American country music is affectively instrumentalized by the film’s young, Filipinx protagonist. In deepening my argument, I work with the film to explain that the kinship between Rose and a genre of music that is hegemonically associated with whiteness produces a “queer sonic” that serves as conduit for the emergence of contingent networks of care and methods of survival. I propose that queer sonic expression, or the unassimilable qualities of sound and genre, is a site where we can broaden racialized imaginings of Filipinx childhood, as it offers an opportunity for reparation.

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Lee, Sang-Yoon. "Reconsideration of Film Music with Repetitive Rhythm Characteristics - Focusing on the Aesthetic and Functional Meaning of Philip Glass’s Film Music -." Journal of the Korea Entertainment Industry Association 13, no. 7 (October 31, 2019): 183–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.21184/jkeia.2019.10.13.7.183.

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Tsugami, Eske. "Girolamo Mei’s Interpretation of Tragic Katharsis as Culmination of His Aesthetic Thought." Culture and Dialogue 9, no. 1 (October 19, 2021): 3–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/24683949-12340096.

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Abstract Girolamo Mei (1519–94) is known in the history of Western music as a humanist who stimulated the birth of the operatic form by his description of ancient tragedy. According to him, it was a wholly musical drama, with all the words sung from beginning to end. However, scholars have been silent about the details of his thought, including the way he conceived tragedy. As a result, the birth of opera has often been considered to be a product of a misunderstanding. However, his interpretation of the form of tragedy is firmly based on the words of Aristotle’s Poetics. It follows from this that his picture of ancient tragedy is a proper one. This paper deals with Mei’s intepretation of tragic katharsis, which corroborates and also is corroborated by his view of ancient tragedy and music, and which at the same time is the culmination of his aesthetic thought.

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Gao, Yu, and Myungsook Choi. "A Study on Convergence of Color and Music in the Movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Korean Society of Culture and Convergence 44, no. 11 (November 30, 2022): 1083–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.33645/cnc.2022.11.44.11.1083.

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The film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) directed by Ang Lee, known as one of the new era of Chinese martial arts films, is the first film in Chinese film history to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Tan Dun, a composer and conductor, won the 73rd Academy Awards for Best Original Music in 2001 by the music of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In 2002, he won the 44th Grammy Award for Best Original Film Music Album, and began to receive extensive attention. This paper explored Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with strong oriental color and traditional music and investigated the Chinese traditional color view and aesthetic thought of director Ang Lee by his pursuit of the costume color and modeling of the main characters in the film. At the same time, through the music of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that throughout the film, to show the music creation characteristics of the integration of eastern and western music of Tan Dun.

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Buslowska, Elzbieta. "Silent (un)becoming song." Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 21 (August 5, 2021): 55–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.21.03.

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Song of Granite (Pat Collins, 2017) and Papusza (Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze, 2013) could be described as unconventional film ‘biographies’ (of the Irish folk singer Joe Heaney and Polish-Roma poet Bronislawa Wajs). In these films, poetry and philosophy come together in what I call the silent (un)becoming undoing the stabilities of (hi)story, identity, and memory. Crossing different aesthetic and geographical territories between fiction and documentary, they speak through the power of a song/poetry, telling a story of fragmentary encounters where histories are invented in the gaps of memories (personal and cultural) and identities disappear in other (be)longings. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the refrain as both the question of the native (home) and the “other” (the unknown homeland), and Maurice Blanchot’s notion of a disaster, the article will attempt to think with the films’ poetic “remembering” that is not narrated through the linearity of a story-telling but sounds silently in the vastness and motionlessness of the landscape, the creative treatment of the archive footage, materiality that remembers past from the outside of remembering and in the emotion of the song repeated in the black and white poetic expression of the refrain. The films’ cinematic force of (un)becoming will be considered as a question of the disastrous longing (for silence) which cannot be known or named but which sends life and thinking towards other memories-potentialities.

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Bartig, Kevin. "Restoring Pushkin: Ideology and Aesthetics in Prokofiev's Queen of Spades." Journal of Musicology 27, no. 4 (2010): 460–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2010.27.4.460.

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Immediately following his repatriation in 1936, Prokofiev composed a film score for a screen adaptation of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades. Although the film was never finished, Prokofiev's completed score reveals an idiosyncratic approach to film music, one that is strikingly different than that found in his better known scores such as Alexander Nevsky. Reconstruction of the production and its context demonstrates how Prokofiev's aesthetic goals of a "new simplicity," characterized by lyricism, spare textures, and avoidance of dissonance, would successfully intersect with the ideological goals of a Jubilee celebration planned by the Soviet government for the centenary of Pushkin's death.

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Beinroth, Carolin, and Claudia Bullerjahn. "Music in German Silent Cinema: Reception in the Film Trade Press 1907-1925." Journal of Film Music 7, no. 2 (November 24, 2017): 21–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/jfm.30971.

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Fan, ZhenBao, Kang Zhang, and XianJun Sam Zheng. "Evaluation and Analysis of White Space in Wu Guanzhong’s Chinese Paintings." Leonardo 52, no. 2 (April 2019): 111–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01409.

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This article reports on a recent study that examines the effect of white space on perception of Chinese paintings. The authors investigate whether white space in Chinese paintings is not simply a blank background space but rather meaningful for aesthetic perception. Applying a computational saliency model to analyze the influence of white space on viewers’ visual information processing, the authors conducted an eye-tracking experiment. As a case study, they analyzed paintings by a well-known artist, Wu Guanzhong, and collected users’ subjective aesthetic ratings. Their results show that white space is not just a silent background: It is intentionally designed to convey certain information and has a significant effect on viewers’ aesthetic experience.

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Allan, Jonathan A. "The Foreskin Aesthetic or Ugliness Reconsidered." Men and Masculinities 23, no. 3-4 (March 4, 2018): 558–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1097184x17753038.

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This article argues that to understand the role and place of the foreskin, we must address the aesthetic question that sits at its root. North American media often describe the foreskin as “ugly,” “gross,” or pejoratively “European”; all of which present, fundamentally, an aesthetic comment on what is pleasing. As such, this article investigates the aesthetic discourse surrounding the foreskin in relation to a range of materials that speak at or around the foreskin. In particular, it looks at sources deemed to be “common”—sex manuals, pregnancy manuals, and film and television—alongside theoretical and scientific studies. Undertaking a close reading of these materials, this article sheds light on the striking similarities that these distinct bodies of literature share and the way that aesthetics undergirds their arguments, often as a silent statement rather than exerted forcefully. Through this argument, this article breaks new ground on the way that we consider the foreskin, and, importantly, the aestheticization processes that shape our understanding of this seemingly ancillary component of the penis. Accordingly, this article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the politics of the foreskin and circumcision by shifting the debate to consider the aesthetic.

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GROVES, STEPHEN. "The Sound of the English Picturesque in the Age of the Landscape Garden." Eighteenth Century Music 9, no. 2 (July 30, 2012): 185–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478570612000048.

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ABSTRACTIn eighteenth-century England, painting, poetry and gardening were often labelled the ‘sister arts’. An increasing interest in English landscape scenes and an emerging taste for ‘nature tourism’ gave rise to the ‘picturesque’ movement. Contemporary writers seldom considered English music as part of this ‘sisterhood’, however, or treated music as a medium for conveying national scenic beauty. When the picturesque was discussed in connection with music, eighteenth-century critics tended to use the concept to explain the tactics of novelty and surprise encountered in German instrumental music. Plays with regularity and expectation were analogous to the surprises and irregularities of picturesque ‘beauty spots’ – natural features studied and imitated by contemporary landscape gardeners. Accordingly, recent musicological studies of the picturesque have also preferred to emphasize its kinship with the unconventional or subversive formal schemas in instrumental music by German composers.This article addresses the silent aporia in this discourse: the apparent absence of any participation in the picturesque movement by composers from England, the country most closely associated with this aesthetic. Focusing on the pictorialism and pastoralism of eighteenth-century English song texts and their musical treatment, this article reveals previously ignored connections between the veneration of national landscape and English vocal music. In consequence, the glee – a decidedly marginal genre in traditional eighteenth-century music historiography – emerges at the centre of contemporary aesthetic concerns, as the foremost musical vehicle for the expression of a distinctively English, painterly engagement with national landscapes.

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Samuel, Kayode M., and Samuel A. Adejube. "What a sound! Diegetic and non-diegetic music in the films of Túndé Kèlání." EJOTMAS: Ekpoma Journal of Theatre and Media Arts 8, no. 1-2 (March 11, 2022): 274–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ejotmas.v8i1-2.15.

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The agency of music to effectively convey ideas in movies and articulate visual-emotional experience of the audience during mise-en-scene has long been established. Existing studies have focused more on the elements that characterize film as a visual experience, than on the diegetic (foreground) and non-diegetic (background) music, especially along their aural aesthetic lines. This article, therefore, investigated the aesthetic connections between traditional and performative significations of music in selected movies of Túndé Kèlání, one of Nigeria’s foremost cinematographers. Using a qualitative (videographic) research design, three movies, Ti Oluwa N’ile, Saworo Ide and K’oseegbe, were purposively selected, based on their unique aesthetic traits and distinct cultural identity quality, for content analysis. A close reading of the musical and textual data was done. Findings revealed that cultural themes in the movies, bordering on entertainment, rituals, politics, philosophy, didactic, panegyric and dirge, were projected through African and Western musical instruments, while folklore and folksongs constituted major sources of materials and cultural signifier. The authors argue that examples of the dialectic and sequential troughs in the performance of music exemplify aesthetic reinforcement, not only in terms of the didactic functionality it expresses, but also in what it conceals.

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Robinson, Kelly. "An Adaptable Aesthetic: Theodor Sparkuhl's Contribution to Late Silent and Early Sound Film-making at British International Pictures, 1929–30." Journal of British Cinema and Television 17, no. 2 (April 2020): 172–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2020.0518.

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The German cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl worked at Elstree from 1929 to 1930. Accounts of this period in Britain have often emphasised the detrimental effects of the arrival of the sound film in 1928, how it sounded the death knell of film as an international medium and how the film industry struggled to adapt (economically, technically, aesthetically). However, this article shows that the international dimension of the film industry did not disappear with the coming of sound and British International Pictures (BIP) was an exception to what Robert Murphy has called the ‘catalogue of failure’ during this turbulent period in British film history. Sparkuhl indisputably contributed to this achievement, working as he did on eight feature films in just two years from around July 1928 to April 1930, as well as directing several BIP shorts. Sparkuhl's career embodies the international nature of the film industry in the 1920s and 1930s. In Germany he moved within very different production contexts, from newsreels to Ufa and the Großfilme; in Britain from big-budget films aimed at the international market to low-scale inexpensive films at BIP. As what Thomas Elsaesser has called an ‘international adventurer’, Sparkuhl cannot be contained within any single national cinema history. The ease with which he slipped in and out of different production contexts demonstrates not just his ability to adapt but also the fluidity between the different national industries during this period. In this transitional phase in Britain, Sparkuhl worked on silent, part sound and wholly sound films, on films aimed at both the international and the indigenous market, and in genres such as the musical, the war film and comedy. The example of Sparkuhl shows that German cameramen were employed not only for their aesthetic prowess but also for their efficiency and adaptability.

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Zvara, Vladimír. "“He Has Lifted the Iron Curtain”: Reflections on Ján Cikker's Literaturopern and Their Reception." Studia Musicologica 59, no. 3-4 (December 2018): 345–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/6.2018.59.3-4.6.

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Abstract During the 1960s, the operatic works of Slovak composer Ján Cikker were among the most often performed contemporary operas in Europe, especially in the two German states. The reasons of this success are as interesting as the reasons of the decline that occurred during the 1970s. In both cases, the intensity of the publisher Bärenreiter's support and marketing played an important role, as did the change of the audience's taste which brought a general decrease in the popularity of the post-war Literaturoper in the tradition of Richard Strauss, the music of which was moderately modern and did not fulfill (as it was not meant to fulfill) the requirements of New Music. The reception of Cikker's work, its aesthetic background, and its musical and dramatic solutions are exemplified within his chef d'oeuvre, the opera Vzkriesenie (Resurrection, 1962), based on Tolstoy's novel, which is highly consistent in its dramaturgy thanks to Fritz Oeser, the libretto's silent co-author.

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Brooks, Erin Michelle. "Sarah Bernhardt on Stage and Screen: Nineteenth-Century Theater Music and Early Silent Film." Journal of Film Music 5, no. 1-2 (April 29, 2013): 57–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/jfm.v5i1-2.57.

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Doan, Joy M. "Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources by Kendra Preston Leonard." Notes 74, no. 3 (2018): 455–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/not.2018.0020.

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Anderson, Tim. ": Music and the Silent Film: Contexts & Case Studies, 1895-1924 . Martin Miller Marks." Film Quarterly 52, no. 1 (October 1998): 88–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fq.1998.52.1.04a00530.

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Uroskie, Andrew V. "Visual Music after Cage: Robert Breer, expanded cinema and Stockhausen's Originals (1964)." Organised Sound 17, no. 2 (July 19, 2012): 163–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s135577181200009x.

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Within William Seitz's 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage for the New York Museum of Modern Art, the question of framing – of art's exhibitionary situation within and against a given environment – had emerged as perhaps the major issue of postwar avant-garde practice. Beyond the familiar paintings of Johns and Rauschenberg, a strategy of radical juxtaposition in this time extended well beyond the use of new materials, to the very institutions of aesthetic exhibition and spectatorship. Perhaps the most significant example of this disciplinary juxtaposition can be found in the intermingling of the static and the temporal arts. Like many artists of the twentieth century, Robert Breer was fascinated by the aesthetic and philosophical character of movement. Trained as a painter, he turned to cinematic animation as a way of extending his inquiry into modernist abstraction. While the success of his initial Form Phases spurred what would be a lifelong commitment to film, Breer quickly grew frustrated with the kind of abstract animation that might be said to characterise the dominant tradition of visual music. Starting in 1955, his Image by Images inaugurated a radical new vision of hyperkinetic montage that would paradoxically function at the threshold of movement and stasis. As such, Breer's film ‘accompaniment’ to the 1964 production of Stockhausen's Originals has a curious status. While untethered from the musical performance, Breer's three-part ‘film performance’ extended Stockhausen's aesthetic and conceptual framework in rich and surprising ways. It might thus be understood as a ‘post-Cagean’ form of visual music, one in which the sonic and visual components function in a relation of autonomous complementarity within an overarching intermedia assemblage.

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Yan, Yulin. "Research on the Narrative Function of Musical Symbols in Youth Movies." Frontiers in Sustainable Development 2, no. 6 (June 22, 2022): 24–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.54691/fsd.v2i6.957.

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Film is an art form that combines sound and picture, and music, as a symbolic expression, plays an increasingly important role in films. In genre films, musical notation often has its own aesthetic value and ideographic function. As an important film genre, youth-themed films have formed a set of proprietary "systems" in the process of continuous development. Its function is not only to cooperate with the picture, but also to express the meaning and textual value of the music independently in the narrative process. Through the analysis of musical symbols in youth-themed movies, this paper attempts to clarify the ideographic mechanism of music in youth movie texts, interpret the main role of musical symbols as an interpretive link in the narrative process of movies, and make Chinese genre film music more vital.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Aesthetic of music for the silent film'

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